A woman put CDN$62,500 in a Bitcoin ATM to send bitcoins to a phone scammer. Prince Edward Island provincial court judge Nancy Orr has ruled that Instacoin, the company who ran the machine, is not responsible, and gets to keep the cash.

Bitcoin’s first sidechain, Liquid, is finally active! Its function is to supply liquidity between exchanges — using a trust-based closed network. Because Bitcoin can only scale by not using Bitcoin. “An exchange converts its bitcoin into ‘LBTC’ – the liquid bitcoin token – which is pegged to actual bitcoin. Once sent there, exchanges can move money around securely and much more quickly than on the main bitcoin chain.” They also plan to run other financial instruments as tokens over this network. The obvious next step is to stop using the Bitcoin network itself for any of this. Frances Coppola details how this reimplements the interbank market — crypto recreates the existing financial system, but badly.

Today’s astounding project that is much less than it appears — Perlin aims to provide cloud computing, but on Android devices belonging to individuals in less-developed countries. This is not what I’d call a convincing pitch. The ICO hasn’t started. Nor is there third-party evidence of the claimed investments from Bitmain and Michael Arrington, let alone details as to what this backing constitutes. The interesting bit is that Perlin claims to use Avalanche, the new not-a-blockchain family of protocols that Emin Gün Sirer is developing. But Sirer’s team isn’t involved — Perlin took the Avalanche family white paper and say they’re making something a bit like it, sort of. Here’s the code. (HT Amy Castor, who passed on covering this press release.)

How hyperbolic crypto press coverage is generated. (I’m sure you can trust everything you read in TechCrunch.) From Thursday:

If Bitcoin mining stopped tomorrow, 0.5% of the world’s electricity demand would simply disappear — which would cover one year’s worth of the carbon emission cuts required to limit temperature rises this century to 2°C. Proof of work must die. “Bitcoin is made from ashes, and if ashes were legal tender, humanity would burn everything in sight and call it progress.”

There is video coming of the Royal Institution session from late September — to be up on the RI’s YouTube at some point. My intro was terrible, and I fumbled Sajida Zouarhi’s name twice. The question-and-answer session afterwards was excellent, however!

The WordPress theme on this site is A1, free version. It updated from version 1.6 to version 2.0 — which broke a pile of stuff, particularly on mobile. I’ve reverted to 1.6 for now, but staying on an unmaintained theme is a bad idea. I welcome your suggestions for suitable replacements.

Gaze not into the abyss, lest you become recognized as an abyss domain expert, and they expect you keep gazing into the damn thing.

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The content of this site is journalism and personal opinion. Nothing contained on this site is, or should be construed as providing or offering, investment, legal, accounting, tax or other advice. Do not act on any opinion expressed here without consulting a qualified professional. I do not hold a position in any crypto asset or cryptocurrency or blockchain company.